This is bad even for torture porn. It starts out promisingly enough, with Jesse Metcalfe understandably freaking out about the abduction of his small son, but once Erika Christensen shows up, she promptly drains any semblance of liveliness that this outing may have had (which, admittedly, wasn't much). Christensen is, with rare exceptions, simply a lousy actress. And she's uncommonly awful here. Neither she nor Metcalfe -- who isn't bad, just bland -- is even slightly believable as parents so vengeful that they'd kidnap and torture the man (they think) murdered their son.
Oh yeah, that parenthetical means that at the end there's a shocking twist. Not. As others have noted, you see it coming from a mile away: the boy's parents may have seized the wrong guy, because there were TWO prisoners on the transport van they are able to hijack with idiotic ease (a fact they apparently weren't aware of -- yeah, right), and somehow we're supposed to think they might mistake the guy they abduct with the man they saw for months on end during his trial.
Matters aren't helped by a truly stupid script and mostly lifeless direction. Of course, people aren't going to watch something like this for the script, acting or direction: they want to see a revenge fantasy played out, which the movie doesn't even deliver due to the aforementioned "twist." The movie swiftly becomes quite boring, and yes, I am including the torture scenes in that assessment.
This is not guilty-pleasure bad. It's just bad.
Oh yeah, that parenthetical means that at the end there's a shocking twist. Not. As others have noted, you see it coming from a mile away: the boy's parents may have seized the wrong guy, because there were TWO prisoners on the transport van they are able to hijack with idiotic ease (a fact they apparently weren't aware of -- yeah, right), and somehow we're supposed to think they might mistake the guy they abduct with the man they saw for months on end during his trial.
Matters aren't helped by a truly stupid script and mostly lifeless direction. Of course, people aren't going to watch something like this for the script, acting or direction: they want to see a revenge fantasy played out, which the movie doesn't even deliver due to the aforementioned "twist." The movie swiftly becomes quite boring, and yes, I am including the torture scenes in that assessment.
This is not guilty-pleasure bad. It's just bad.